The ACLU: Aborting Girls and Down Syndrome Babies Is Everybody’s Right

There is good news in North Dakota this week as the legislature there has passed two bills: one outlawing gender-selective and eugenic abortions rooted in genetic anomalies, and the other outlawing abortion once a heartbeat is detectable. Get the N.Y. Times story here.

This news comes hot on the heels of Arizona’s banning abortions at 12 weeks, and adds to the victories in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma, which have banned sex-selective abortions. While this is all good news, we must stop and consider what is happening here, what is being accomplished, and how far we have fallen.

There was a time when the American Civil Liberties Union actually championed the rights of the weakest and least among us to the fullest protection of the law. Times have changed, as we’ve seen last week in North Dakota. From the Times article:

“We urge the governor to veto all of these bills to ensure that this personal and private decision can be made by a woman and her family, not politicians sitting in the Capitol,” said Jennifer Dalven, the director of the A.C.L.U.’s Reproductive Freedom Project.

But again, and again, the central issue remains the great unanswered question, one which Ms. Dalven and her organization would have answered with ease in a bygone era:

Do politicians sitting in the capital, or judges in courtrooms have the right to determine who among us is human and what the criteria for being considered human ought to be?

This isn’t a religious question, but a civil one, and hinging on it is nothing less than the fate of American jurisprudence, as well as scientific and biomedical ethics. Before one can pass a law, make a legal judgement, or perform a scientific or clinical manipulation, one must first determine the identity and status of the object under consideration.

People of reason and good will recoil at the consideration of our slave-holding past in America. They similarly recoil at our segregationist past, as well as our past with eugenic sterilization. All of these issues are repellent to the ACLU as well, and as Ms. Dalven would have to agree, these issues scorched the American landscape precisely because the legislators sitting in capitals failed to rein in justices and judges who were out of control.

Ms. Dalven would also have to agree that these issues scorched the American landscape precisely because a political elite arrogated to themselves the power to define personhood criteria. This was done as the sole means of usurping the ability to control those rights defined by the Founders as unalienable and granted solely by the Creator.

Having abandoned the protection of the weakest among us and championing the “rights” of those who prey upon the weak, the ACLU has gutted itself. In championing the right to murder little girls for being little girls, and for championing the murder of the genetically imperfect, the ACLU has become indistinguishible from the slaveholding and segregationist class it once despised and against whom it found its organizational identity.

Such is the malevolent power of abortion to corrupt.

In Roe v. Wade the justices argued that the absence of scientific evidence supporting a definitive beginning of life was their rationale for permitting abortion. Using arguments from the Middle Ages, such as ‘quickening’, they ignored the embryology texts of their day that fixed the beginning of human life at fertilization. With the advances in embryoscopy and ultrasonography today one would think that the last vestige of doubt would have been destroyed by science, warranting a revisiting of Roe by the Court; but that would require intellectual honesty and human decency.

Instead, today, forty years later we are now arguing the right to target what science shows as fully formed human beings because of their genetalia, or because of some atypical genetic constellation.

Instead,, today, forty years later Planned Parenthood has dropped the euphemisms such as “pro-choice,” no longer seeing them as necessary or servicable.

Similarly, the attempts to defeat the fetal heartbeat bills bespeak a duplicity from the outset. What can be more human or romantic than the sound of a beating heart?

Taken together, those are profoundly troubling developments. We have defined deviancy down. We are arguing over a degree of malevolence that makes the original argument pale in comparison.

The Democrat Party defeated attempts in Congress last year to outlaw sex-selective abortions. In those and other similar measures, both they and the ACLU have abandoned the moral high ground. Let’s hope that the Republican governor of North Dakota has the courage to pick up the fallen battle standard of the left and soldier on.

Dr. Gerard M. Nadal currently serves as the Executive Director of the Children First Foundation, and is past National Director of Medical Students for Life of America. Dr. Nadal has taught Microbiology, Medical Microbiology, Immunology, Genetics, Anatomy and Physiology, Biochemistry, and Molecular Biology for sixteen years, both at Saint John’s University, New York City and Manhattan College, Riverdale, New York as Visiting Professor of Biology. He blogs regularly at Coming Home.

I don’t know if there is much to say except, God help us! Those children are so precious and darling! Merciful Lord, open the eyes of the blinded and protect the innocent!

Linda Maloy

I just posted this on FaceBook because I have the (probable) vain hope that SOMEONE will take up my challenge to, at least, read it! With the state of science today, the argument can be take up without even mentioning God. However, we people of faith know just WHO is the author of these precious lives! This has been said a zillion times, but it is still true…there are millions of couples out there who are dying to adopt a baby, ANY baby, and welcome the “inconvenience” and all the rest of it. The restrictions on these couples by the bureaucrats makes it nigh unto impossible to pass their tests, however. That needs to be changed! When people without a brain in their heads crank out babies like popcorn and then ignore them, and others kill these precious babies because they are a “mistake” MUCH more often than any so-called “risk to the mother’s health” (translate: babies get in the way of partying your head off and copulating like a rabbit), these are the days I wonder how much longer Our Lord will put up with us. We need to take a good, coldly honest look at ourselves, and the underlying selfishness that got us here up to and including the current POTUS. “Gimme, gimme, gimme” is no way to live! My struggle to stay calm and rational is about to explode in light of this incredible CRAP Dr. Nadal did such a marvelous job of exposing and explaining, so I will shut up. God bless us all, anyway.

Alfred Caulkin

why didn’t the goodly republican governor act to ban all abortions?

Peter Nyikos

It’s going to be tough enough for the North Dakota heartbeat law to survive a court challenge–slim to none, in fact. The Supreme Court even denied certiorati to a Guam law that would have banned all abortions, even before the Casey v. Planned Parenthood decision.

The other two North Dakota laws do have a chance. So does the Arizona law, because a case could be made for Casey’s “early in the pregnancy” right to abortion ending at the end of the first trimester. Also, lots of “mainstream secular” sources pretend that this was all Roe v. Wade did. This is why a recent Pew poll “found” so much opposition to overturning that abominable decision:

I have no problem with keeping the down’s syndrome babies, if you can take them out of the mother who no longer wants to give another human access to her body, and put it in a surrogate, and then find someone to raise it.

Its not just about whether or not its a human yet, or if it deserves life. Someone has to raise that child.

Richard III

You’d think the Chinese government would be giving its orphans away for free, like making everyone who wants to visit the country take at least 1 baby home. :-/

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